Word Nerd! - What is a "Paraben", and why should I care?

PARABENS

I am a word nerd through and through. I want to know what words mean, where they came from, and how to use them. In undergrad, I took gleeful advantage of our free student membership to the OED Online and could spend hours trolling through the history and subtle nuances of a word's meaning. (Cut me a break, I was a Linguistics major).

But I confess that when it comes to health, science, technology, and general greeny-ness, I often throw words around without having even the slightest clue what they mean. Except maybe a dull sense that something is "bad" or "good". And so, to expand my own working knowledge of the buzz words and phrases relevant to the G3 experiment, I'm going to try to post a Word Nerd feature once a week.

This week, we're gonna start with PARABENS.
My general sense is that Parabens are BAD. But if you had asked me yesterday what they are and why we should chuck them all out of our shower caddies and cabinets, I would have said something like: "...umm... because they are BAD!".  And this confidence in their badness is largely derived from the fact that the expensive greeny shampoos often proudly proclaim that they are PARABEN FREE! So, I guess if they are really proud of that then that means that things without parabens are better, right?

Anyway. I did a little websurfing for us, and I found that while some studies say that parabens are not really that harmful, there are still some pretty sucky potential dangers, including possible links to cancer and messing with your hormones. The simplest explanation for all the fuss was found, of course, on Wikipedia, which explained that parabens can mimic estrogen. And, presumably (this is my editorializing), fake and/or extra estrogen seeping into your delicately balanced body is BAD!

Parabens are used as preservatives in products like shampoos, moisturizers, some pharmaceuticals, and even toothpaste. Some foods also use parabens as preservatives. Wikipedia calmly reminds us that some parabens occur naturally in foods like blueberries.

Seeking some non-wiki information, I turned to the good peeps over at Discovery Health, who have quite a bit of info about parabens and the controversy surrounding their relative danger and/or safety. They are much smarter than I am, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

If you'd like to read a more conspiracy-theorist-style take on the "Is my shampoo really giving me cancer??" debate, check out this article at the Huffington Post. While not specifically about parabens, it's chock full of good old fashioned scare-you-into-using-only-puppy-kisses-as-face-soap gloom and doom. I will probably come back to that article some other time after I've had a chance to read it critically and thoughtfully. Which I couldn't do today, because it is scary.

My Totally Unscientific Conclusion re: Parabens
There are paraben-free options out there that can work for my personal care needs, so why risk it? And parabens-in-food? I imagine that if I stop eating so much prepacked food, I will dramatically reduce my exposure to parabens-as-fungicide in the stuff that I eat. Because really, if it needs an anti-fungal ingredient, do I really want to be eating it?